Post #268
650 words; 3 minutes to read
Anthony N. Doob, University of Toronto & Jane B. Sprott, Toronto Metropolitan University.
If we were testing the new government on crime reduction ideas, we might ask them to choose between:
— A tough approach such as increasing pre-trial detentions of legally innocent people – an election platform proposal that the Toronto Star reports is still being considered; or
— A public health approach such as hiring trained nurses to visit “at risk” mothers (young, single and/or poor) monthly during the pregnancy and for 2 years afterwards to address not only health problems, but also to help the young mother with family planning, getting a job, raising their child, etc.
Each approach costs money. The criminal justice approach is exceptionally expensive. One day in custody awaiting trial costs the provinces about $326. With cases starting in bail court in Ontario taking, on average, 105 days to complete, this means that an average of more than $34,000 is being used to detain each of these accused.
But it gets worse. In a study we carried out for Ontario a few years ago, we found that in one year in Ontario, of those who detained prior to trial, 17,893 (or 29%) had all their charges stayed, withdrawn or dismissed. 4,534 of them were detained up until the day that the case was completed. Detention before trial is not rare. 72% of Canada’s daily count of provincial/territorial prisoners are being held prior to trial. Furthermore, it has been shown that detention for a week or longer while awaiting trial increases the likelihood of long-term offending (as compared to releasing the person while awaiting trial). 105 days in pretrial detention doesn’t sound like a very good crime prevention approach.
More generally, imprisonment is also not as good as it first appears as a crime control strategy if one takes into account that most people who are arrested are eventually going to back in our communities. A recent paper examined the impact of imprisonment across 116 separate studies, representing 4.5 million people convicted and sentenced in 15 different countries. These studies examined the effect of imprisonment on new convictions, arrests, charges, or reincarcerations and overall found either no impact or a slight increase in reoffending. We are not suggesting that imprisonment should not be used. Rather we are suggesting that increasing our use of imprisonment from its already high rate will almost certainly fail as a crime prevention policy. We should learn to use imprisonment more selectively.
The nurse home visitation programs have received less attention from criminologists in part because they were originally developed, not surprisingly, for health reasons. Their health benefits are as expected. But they also reduced crime. Researchers found that children who had received home visits from a nurse had fewer police contacts, arrests and convictions, and fewer contacts with child welfare system when they were adolescents. Money saved from these public costs are not as visible as “crime costs”, but they are real and they contribute to the general and safety health of Canadian society.
Prime Minister Carney made an unusual and very encouraging statement in his victory speech. He admitted that as Prime Minister he would probably make mistakes but said he would “commit to admitting them openly, to correcting them quickly, and always learning from them.” In this case, he can quietly admit a mistake before making it and avoid doing something that has been shown to be ineffective. We doubt that there are simple answers to Canada’s crime problems that are certain to work. Resources in all areas, including crime control, are scarce. The federal government has a responsibility not to legislate additional expensive and ineffective programs that will increase provincial/territorial costs. Hence it might be good to start from an empirically based “best guess” of what to do to reduce crime and limit federal involvement to programs that have a decent chance of being effective.
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